To the world at large, Kate Douglas Wiggin is best remembered as the
author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903). But in the Judd
household, we recall her as the author of the bathetic yuletide classic
The
Birds' Christmas Carol.

The brief novella tells the story of Carol Bird, a sickly little rich
girl born on Christmas Eve. An impossibly good and generous child,
she is inevitably doomed:

"Dear heart," said Mr. Bird, pacing up and down the
library
floor, "it is no use to shut our eyes to it any
longer; Carol
will never be well again. It almost seems
as if I could not bear
it when I think of that loveliest child doomed to
lie there day
after day, and, what is still more, to suffer pain
that we are
helpless to keep away from her. Merry Christmas,
indeed; it
gets to be the saddest day in the year to me!" and
poor Mr. Bird
sank into a chair by the table, and buried his face
in his hands,
to keep his wife from seeing the tears that would
come in spite
of all his efforts. "But, Donald, dear," said
sweet Mrs. Bird,
with trembling voice, "Christmas day may not be
so merry with us
as it used, but it is very happy, and that is better,
and very
blessed, and that is better yet. I suffer
chiefly for Carol's
sake, but I have almost given up being sorrowful
for my own. I
am too happy in the child, and I see too clearly
what she has
done for us and for our boys."

"That's true, bless her sweet heart," said Mr. Bird;
"she has
been better than a daily sermon in the house ever
since she was
born, and especially since she was taken ill."

"Yes, Donald and Paul and Hugh were three strong,
willful,
boisterous boys, but you seldom see such tenderness,
devotion,
thought for others and self-denial in lads of their
years. A
quarrel or a hot word is almost unknown in this
house. Why?
Carol would hear it, and it would distress her,
she is so full of
love and goodness. The boys study with all
their might and main.

Why? Partly, at least, because they like to
teach Carol, and
amuse her by telling her what they read. When
the seamstress
comes, she likes to sew in Miss Carol's room, because
there she
forgets her own troubles, which, Heaven knows, are
sore enough!
And as for me, Donald, I am a better woman every
day for Carol's
sake; I have to be her eyes, ears, feet, hands--her
strength, her
hope; and she, my own little child, is my example!"

"I was wrong, dear heart," said Mr. Bird more cheerfully;
"we
will try not to repine, but to rejoice instead,
that we have an
'angel of the house' like Carol."

"And as for her future," Mrs. Bird went on, "I think
we need not
be over-anxious. I feel as if she did not
belong altogether to
us, and when she has done what God sent her for,
He will take her
back to Himself--and it may not be very long!"
Here it was poor
Mrs. Bird's turn to break down, and Mr. Bird's turn
to comfort
her.

Having reformed her family, Carol determines to help out the poor but
numerous Ruggles children who live in the carriage house outside her window.
To this end she plans a Christmas Party for them and sacrifices her own
gifts in order to buy them presents. But after this happiest day
of her life, she passes away in her sleep as the strains of a neighboring
church choir waft through her window. The Ruggles children are mortified
that they may have caused her death:

Sadness reigned, it is true, in the little house
behind the
garden; and one day poor Sarah Maud, with a courage
born of
despair, threw on her hood and shawl, walked straight
to a
certain house a mile away, dashed up the marble
steps and into
good Dr. Bartol's office, falling at his feet as
she cried, "Oh,
sir, it was me an' our childern that went to Miss
Carol's last
dinner party, an' if we made her worse we can't
never be happy
again!" Then the kind old gentleman took her
rough hand in his
and told her to dry her tears, for neither she nor
any of her
flock had hastened Carol's flight--indeed, he said
that had it
not been for the strong hopes and wishes that filled
her tired
heart, she could not have stayed long enough to
keep that last
merry Christmas with her dear ones.

And so the old years, fraught with memories, die,
one after
another, and the new years, bright with hopes, are
born to take
their places; but Carol lives again in every chime
of Christmas
bells that peal glad tidings and in every Christmas
anthem sung
by childish voices.

I fondly recall my Mother sobbing through this chapter as Jeff Farris,
one of the neighborhood kids who basically lived at our house, asked plaintively,
"Are you going to stop crying long enough to finish this? I'll never
find out what happened." (NB: Here's a special visual aid--to imagine
this scene in your head, simply picture a small gang of urchins in a rice
paddie surrounding a woman on the verge of a breakdown )

I don't know that I'd go as far as my Mom (see her review) and say that
every holiday requires a sobfest, but it doesn't hurt for those of us with
health and plenty to be reminded that we are pretty lucky. And even
a certified curmudgeon like me still gets his heart strings tugged by this
little tearjerker.

Dorothy C. Judd's Review:

If you are at all sentimental and believe, as I do, that no holiday season
is
complete without at least one good cry (even if it's over the Hallmark
commercial), then I highly recommend that you read The Birds' Christmas
Carol
by Kate Douglas Wiggin, written in 1886. This book, which my mother
and Aunt
Dot had read as children, was given to me for Christmas when I was about
10,
and read to me by my Uncle Sam. Wiggin wrote so descriptively, even
to
accents, that between her language, the colored pictures in the original
edition, and my own visualization abilities, highly developed from listening
to radio stories, I did not just hear the story, I experienced it.
The Carol of the title is a beautiful child, born into a loving family
who
previously had only sons. Of course she develops some unnamed illness
and is
confined to her bed. For the Christmas described in this book, Carol
decides
that all she wants is to provide a marvelous holiday for the Ruggles family,
a boisterous gang of poor children, whom she delights in watching out her
bedroom window.

The description of each of these children, the outfits the mother creates
for
each of them, the manners she tries to drill into them in preparation for
the
great day will make you laugh right out loud. You attend the celebration
rather than observing it!

Ah, and then
One Christmas, I was reading this book chapter by chapter to my own children
and some kids in the neighborhood. Though I had heard and read the story
many
times over, when I reached a certain point, I just started sobbing.
One
neighbor child, Jeffrey, said, "Darn, now I'll never know how the story
ends!"
But I did read the rest of the story, and I have to believe that it still
has
a place in the heart. Twenty years after I had read it to a class
of
fifth-graders, I received a letter from one of those students saying that
she
had remembered the story all of those years and had been overjoyed to find
the book that day while she was in a bookstore. She said she could
not wait
to read it to her own children!

(P.S. To be filed under, "Don't judge a book by its title: Had this book
not
been read to me, I doubt I would have read it myself as I thought it was
about feathered birds, and they did not interest me at all. But I
was the
most fortunate of children in that I had an aunt and uncle who read
volume
after volume to me: Little Women, Little Men, Jo's Boys, Eight Cousins,
The
Little Princess, Secret Garden, all the Heidi books, all the "Little
Pepper" books, Mary Poppins, and countless others. From this experience
developed my love of reading and of words. Knowing what a difference being
read to made in my life, I read to my own kids and to my students,
long
before it was fashionable, and now I have the joy of reading to my
grandchildren.)